Obama Absolutely Unloads on Trump During 2016 State of the Union

President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address struck a hopeful note on Tuesday night, as the nation’s 44th president listed his accomplishments and looked past the end of his term to deliver prescriptions for a better day.

Some of his harshest words, however, were pointed at the rhetoric underpinning Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination. After citing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay as “a recruitment brochure for our enemies,” Obama directed his oratory at Trump—whom he did not need to name:

“That’s why we need to reject any politics that targets people because
of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness.
It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world
respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity
and our openness and the way we respect every faith. His Holiness,
Pope Francis, told this body from the very spot I stand tonight that
“to imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the
best way to take their place.” When politicians insult Muslims, when a
mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer.
That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in
the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it
betrays who we are as a country.”

Trump wasn’t the only Republican candidate to draw the president’s repudiation. “The world will look to us to help solve these problems, and our answer needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians,” Obama said, referencing Senator Ted Cruz’s proposed solutions to unrest in the Middle East. “That may work as a TV sound bite, but it doesn’t pass muster on the world stage.”

Later in the speech, Obama returned to once again criticize Trump-style rhetoric. “As frustration grows,” he said, “there will be voices urging us to fall back into tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.”

Trump largely avoided live-tweeting Obama’s speech, though he did send out a couple of messages. One criticized the Iranian nuclear deal (somewhat bizarrely—Trump’s beef this time is that uranium was sent to Russia, not the U.S.). The other was typically Trumpian in the way it leaned on detailed policy points to make a compelling argument.

CUBA

Although he announced the thaw of U.S.-Cuba relations in 2014, Obama’s true D.G.A.F.-ness emerged as the two countries negotiated and planned the eventual re-establishment of diplomatic relations between America and a country so resolutely communist that America refused to talk to it for 50 years. But nothing showed Obama’s lack of fucks as much as his recent announcement that, when the moment arises in 2016, he wants to actually visit Cuba.

Sure, the trip is contingent on him getting to talk to political dissidents (“Part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” he told Yahoo! News). But for a president seen on the right as a pinko commie, this is a risky move. Admittedly, it’s easier when one has no fucks to give.

Photo: By Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images.

FEDERAL PRISON SYSTEM

Federal prison and drug law reform is, admittedly, a bipartisan issue: liberals think it’s unjust, conservatives think it’s a waste of money, and practically everyone believes that weed doesn’t deserve a 20-year sentence. Obama, however, stepped over everyone’s heads this year and symbolically commuted the sentences of 46 people imprisoned for nonviolent crimes, 14 of whom had been sentenced to life in prison.

“These men and women were not hardened criminals, but the overwhelming majority had been sentenced to at least 20 years,” he said in a Facebook video. “I believe that, at its heart, America is a nation of second chances. And I believe these folks deserve their second chance.”

It was one of the few times in his term he’d used his pardon power (which, naturally, brought out the critics who said he pulled a stunt). To top it all off, days afterward, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.

Photo: By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

CLIMATE CHANGE

While the United States sent representatives to the U.N.’s climate-change conference in Paris with the hopes of hammering out an international plan to curb global warming (which they finalized last weekend), at home, Obama decided this year to stop waiting. In August, he announced an ambitious domestic plan aimed at lowering carbon emissions throughout the U.S., and, in doing so, unharnessed himself of all the fucks burdening his spirit.

With that heavy load lifted, Obama didn’t hold back from provoking his Republican foes, arguing that regulations on carbon-producing businesses would be good for the economy, that electricity bills would not impact the average American consumer, that climate change indirectly caused the rise of ISIS, and that the fight against climate change needed to be as strong as the fight against terrorism. Consider Mitch McConnell’s long-feared War on Coal declared.

Naturally, Republicans took umbrage at all of those statements, but did Obama care? Nay, for the field in which he once grew his fucks had grown fallow.

Photo: By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.

GUN CONTROL

Depressingly, Obama lost all of the fucks in regard to gun control as he faced the soul-crushing task of addressing 13 mass shootings, and countless other horrific events, throughout his presidency.

While Obama gave the traditional offering of thoughts and prayers during the first 10 mass shootings during his administration—before trying and failing to push gun-control reforms through Congress after the Newtown shootings—by the 11th, the October 5 massacre at a community-college campus in Oregon, he let loose his rage at having to address yet “another mass shooting”:

We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson,
after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy
for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or
her hands on a gun. And what's become routine, of course, is the
response to those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.
Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: ‘We
need more guns,’ they’ll argue, ‘fewer gun safety laws.’ Does anybody
really believe that? ... And of course, what’s also routine is that
somebody somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this
issue.’ This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to
our common life together, to the body politic. . . .

I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure
as president to offer my condolences to families in these
circumstances. But based on my experience as president, I can’t
guarantee that. And that’s terrible to say. And it can change.

Photo: By Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Sipa USA/AP Images.

KENYA

This year, Obama went to Africa and visited Kenya, the home of his late father and the subject of the birther theory—a trip that would have been shocking during his first term, when conspiracies about the president's real place of birth were very nearly mainstream. “I suspect that some of my critics back home are suspecting that I’m back here to look for my birth certificate,” Obama joked while delivering a toast at a state dinner hosted by the Kenyan president. “That is not the case.” These are the words of a man whose bag of fucks is nearly completely empty.

Photo: By Evan Vucci/AP Images.

SELFIE STICKS

Yes, that happened.

The official explanation: Obama made a video with BuzzFeed to remind the young people to re-enroll at Healthcare.gov before the deadline, brushing off all the critics who were shocked, shocked by his undignified use of the selfie stick.

The unofficial explanation: #nofilter #nofucks.

Photo: Courtesy of Buzzfeed.

CUBA

Although he announced the thaw of U.S.-Cuba relations in 2014, Obama’s true D.G.A.F.-ness emerged as the two countries negotiated and planned the eventual re-establishment of diplomatic relations between America and a country so resolutely communist that America refused to talk to it for 50 years. But nothing showed Obama’s lack of fucks as much as his recent announcement that, when the moment arises in 2016, he wants to actually visit Cuba.

Sure, the trip is contingent on him getting to talk to political dissidents (“Part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” he told Yahoo! News). But for a president seen on the right as a pinko commie, this is a risky move. Admittedly, it’s easier when one has no fucks to give.

By Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images.

FEDERAL PRISON SYSTEM

Federal prison and drug law reform is, admittedly, a bipartisan issue: liberals think it’s unjust, conservatives think it’s a waste of money, and practically everyone believes that weed doesn’t deserve a 20-year sentence. Obama, however, stepped over everyone’s heads this year and symbolically commuted the sentences of 46 people imprisoned for nonviolent crimes, 14 of whom had been sentenced to life in prison.

“These men and women were not hardened criminals, but the overwhelming majority had been sentenced to at least 20 years,” he said in a Facebook video. “I believe that, at its heart, America is a nation of second chances. And I believe these folks deserve their second chance.”

It was one of the few times in his term he’d used his pardon power (which, naturally, brought out the critics who said he pulled a stunt). To top it all off, days afterward, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison.

By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

CLIMATE CHANGE

While the United States sent representatives to the U.N.’s climate-change conference in Paris with the hopes of hammering out an international plan to curb global warming (which they finalized last weekend), at home, Obama decided this year to stop waiting. In August, he announced an ambitious domestic plan aimed at lowering carbon emissions throughout the U.S., and, in doing so, unharnessed himself of all the fucks burdening his spirit.

With that heavy load lifted, Obama didn’t hold back from provoking his Republican foes, arguing that regulations on carbon-producing businesses would be good for the economy, that electricity bills would not impact the average American consumer, that climate change indirectly caused the rise of ISIS, and that the fight against climate change needed to be as strong as the fight against terrorism. Consider Mitch McConnell’s long-feared War on Coal declared.

Naturally, Republicans took umbrage at all of those statements, but did Obama care? Nay, for the field in which he once grew his fucks had grown fallow.

By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.

GUN CONTROL

Depressingly, Obama lost all of the fucks in regard to gun control as he faced the soul-crushing task of addressing 13 mass shootings, and countless other horrific events, throughout his presidency.

While Obama gave the traditional offering of thoughts and prayers during the first 10 mass shootings during his administration—before trying and failing to push gun-control reforms through Congress after the Newtown shootings—by the 11th, the October 5 massacre at a community-college campus in Oregon, he let loose his rage at having to address yet “another mass shooting”:

We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson,
after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy
for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or
her hands on a gun. And what's become routine, of course, is the
response to those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.
Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: ‘We
need more guns,’ they’ll argue, ‘fewer gun safety laws.’ Does anybody
really believe that? ... And of course, what’s also routine is that
somebody somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this
issue.’ This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to
our common life together, to the body politic. . . .

I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure
as president to offer my condolences to families in these
circumstances. But based on my experience as president, I can’t
guarantee that. And that’s terrible to say. And it can change.

By Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Sipa USA/AP Images.

KENYA

This year, Obama went to Africa and visited Kenya, the home of his late father and the subject of the birther theory—a trip that would have been shocking during his first term, when conspiracies about the president's real place of birth were very nearly mainstream. “I suspect that some of my critics back home are suspecting that I’m back here to look for my birth certificate,” Obama joked while delivering a toast at a state dinner hosted by the Kenyan president. “That is not the case.” These are the words of a man whose bag of fucks is nearly completely empty.

By Evan Vucci/AP Images.

SELFIE STICKS

Yes, that happened.

The official explanation: Obama made a video with BuzzFeed to remind the young people to re-enroll at Healthcare.gov before the deadline, brushing off all the critics who were shocked, shocked by his undignified use of the selfie stick.